Facebook Likes Broadcom, Intel, Mellanox Switches

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Broadcom, Intel, and Mellanox have developed competing specifications for datacenter switches, responding to a call from the Facebook-led Open Compute Project.

OCP called earlier this year for open specs for software-agnostic leaf and spine switches to complement its existing specs for streamlined servers. The specs aim to speed innovation in networking hardware, "help software-defined networking continue to evolve and flourish," and give big datacenter operators more flexibility in how they create cloud computing systems, said Frank Frankovsky, a Facebook datacenter executive and chair of the OCP Foundation in a blog posted Monday.

The project's goal is to deliver a switch that can be rebooted to handle different jobs as needed. So far the OCP group received more than 30 proposals for systems or components.

Intel posted online a full reference design for its proposal for a 48x4 10/40G switch (below). The design uses Intel's FM6764 switch acquired with Fulcrum Microsystems and two of Intel's own SoCs -- the Crystal Forest control plane processor and the Cave Creek chipset for daughter cards. Quanta and one other OEM built systems based on the design.

Broadcom said it has delivered a spec and a working system based on its Trident II switching chip that meets OCP needs. However the company declined to release further details.

Mellanox proposed a switch based on its SwitchX-2 switch and an x86 processor running the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) software from Cumulus Networks. The switch supports either 48 SFP+ ports and 12 QSFP ports or 60 10GbE server ports when using QSFP+ to SFP+ breakout cables.

Separately, Cumulus submitted to OCP its ONIE software, a boot loader for installing software on network switches. It enables a generic switch to run a variety of networking software environments.

Further work on networking specs and proposals continues at an OCP event this week in San Antonio.

The datacenter guys (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) actually seem to be cooperating in this area rather than competing. Most of the advances in datacenter design seem to be being shared relatively openly rather than being held as proprietary. In a way that makes sense, since open standards will drive down the cost for their equipment and between these few names they are becoming a significant part of the market.

Facebook is fully transparent and open to work with all comers. Microsoft is somewhat open about what its doing on its own. Amazon shares a some info with EC2 end users about what sorts of servers they can buy time on, and Google just gives occational peeks into what its doing.